42. Family Dinner
FAMILY DINNER
JIN — SEOUL
As we drew close to the hotel, I turned to Sang-hoon. “I want you to come to dinner with my parents tonight.”
For a moment he just stared at me.
“Joon-hi-ah...”
His voice had gone rough.
“What?”
He looked away first. “You know what.”
I did. Meeting my parents wasn’t just dinner. It wasn’t another security briefing or another stop on the tour. It was an invitation across a line we’d spent years pretending didn’t exist.
“Before Cannes I thought I might die without ever telling you how I felt. Two days from now someone may try again.” I took his hand. “If I’m introducing the most important people in my life to each other, I’m not waiting any longer.”
Sang-hoon stared down at our joined hands.
“Your parents already know I’m your stylist. Your mother already treats me like family whenever we meet. How are we going to tell them things have changed?”
“I don’t think we’ll have to tell them,” I said. “I think they’ll see right away.”
Neither of us had been allowed to say what we felt for each other out loud. But over the course of the tour, I’d learned that everyone close to us had been able to see our connection, even before we told them. My parents would be the same way.
Sang-hoon and I dropped our bags in the room Sun-hee-noona had booked for us, and then a Starhouse limousine took us to my parents’ apartment in time for a late dinner.
The building was the same one I’d grown up in—modest, aging, in a neighborhood that hadn’t quite caught up to Seoul’s rapid development. But my parents had moved to a bigger unit on a higher floor, one with a balcony and a view of the city.
Paid for with my success. With the money I sent them every month from tour earnings and endorsement deals.
The elevator still made that particular grinding sound on the way up, the hallway still smelled faintly of the neighbor’s cooking, and the brass number on my parents’ door was slightly crooked, the way it had been since they moved in and my father had tried to fix it and made things worse.
My mother answered before I could knock.
She’d heard the elevator. She always did.
She pulled me in by the arms the way she had since I had grown too tall to be picked up, and I let her, pressing my face into her shoulder and breathing in lavender soap and the garlic she’d been cooking with and something underneath both of those that I couldn’t name but recognized immediately as home.
For a moment I forgot everything except that I was here and she was real and her hands were on my back the way they’d been after every hard thing in my life.
“Joon-hi-ah,” she said into my hair. “You’re too thin. Are they not feeding you on tour?”
“I’m fine, Eomma.”
She pulled back to look at me the way she always did—cataloging, assessing, deciding for herself whether my answer was accurate. Then she saw Sang-hoon behind me.
She wagged her finger at him. “Sang-hoon-ah! Aren’t you supposed to be looking after him?”
“He does,” I said.
And I reached out and took Sang-hoon’s hand.
My mother went very still. Then she made a sound I recognized from my childhood—the soft, involuntary ai-yah she made when she was overwhelmed and trying not to show it—and her eyes went bright.
She looked at our joined hands, then at my face, then at Sang-hoon’s, and what she found there seemed to be exactly what she expected to find.
“I always knew,” she said, to no one in particular.
My father appeared in the hallway behind her. He took one look at the situation and the expression on his face did something complicated—pride wrestling with emotion, the way it always did when he was trying not to embarrass himself.
“See,” he said to my mother. “I told you.”
“You did,” she agreed.
“And I never argued with you.” He looked at me, then at Sang-hoon with the careful attention he gave to people he was deciding to trust. “Our son, the international star. We watched videos online. Paris, London, New York. You were amazing.”
“Come in, come in,” my mother said, already pulling us both inside. “I made all Joon-hi’s favorites. Sang-hoon, I know you love them too.”
She did know. She’d been feeding Sang-hoon at family events for four years, always noting what he finished and what he left, filing it away the way she filed away everything that mattered. My mother’s love was encyclopedic. It kept records.
The apartment felt smaller than I remembered, the way it always did when I’d been away. But also more itself, too. The shelves lined with photos, the good dishes brought out because I was coming, the specific weight of accumulated years that only existed in places where a family had actually lived.
I looked at the photos while my mother went to the kitchen.
Me at fifteen outside the Starhouse building on my first day, skinny and terrified and trying to look like I wasn’t either.
The debut showcase, where I’d worn a black shirt the stylists said made me look older.
The first music show win, all five of us screaming, Min-kyu crying and trying to hide it.
And there was Sang-hoon in several of them, standing slightly to the side in the way that staff always stood. Present but positioned as background, part of the apparatus rather than the story.
He’d been there the whole time. In the frame, in the periphery, in every important moment of our time together.
I’d spent all that time not understanding that he felt for me what I felt for him.
Dinner was doenjang jjigae and japchae and the seasoned spinach I’d been eating since childhood, and the table was small enough that Sang-hoon’s knee pressed against mine under it throughout the meal.
My mother served him before he could reach for anything himself.
My father asked him about his work with a genuine curiosity that had nothing to do with managing a conversation and everything to do with actually wanting to know.
Sang-hoon answered carefully at first, the way he always did with new situations—watching, calibrating, figuring out the room.
But my father had a way of making people feel accountable to their own honesty, and gradually I watched Sang-hoon relax into something more real.
He talked about the tour, about the technical work of styling for stadium productions, about the differences between venues.
My father listened the way he listened to everything, with his full attention, nodding at the right moments.
At some point my mother refilled Sang-hoon’s bowl without asking.
He looked startled. Then he looked at me.
I shrugged. Welcome to this.
My father’s terrible jokes were the same as always, and I laughed at them in the way I always had.
Genuinely, despite myself, the laughter arriving before I could decide whether it was warranted.
Sang-hoon laughed too, which made my father visibly pleased, which made my mother roll her eyes in the fond, practiced way she’d been rolling her eyes at my father for thirty years.
This was what I’d been afraid to give Sang-hoon. This ordinary thing.
I watched him across the table, being welcomed into something that couldn’t be unwelcomed.
My parents had already decided. By the time dessert arrived—sliced fruit, because my mother believed in ending meals simply—Sang-hoon had become more than a stylist I had brought along for a meal, as I had so many times.
It felt like relief, but also like standing at the edge of something I wasn’t sure I’d be allowed to keep.
My father set down his fork and looked at me.
“Your mother and I have tickets for Tuesday night,” he said. “Front section, good seats. The company sent them.”
“I asked them to,” I said. “I wanted you there. To see the final show of the tour.”
“We’re so proud of you,” my mother said. Her eyes were wet. “Everything you’ve accomplished. Everything you’ve become.”
I wanted to tell them. The words were there—stay home, don’t come, I need you to be safe, someone wants to kill me and if you’re in that stadium and something goes wrong I will never—
I couldn’t say any of it.
Because if I said it, they’d try to stop me. And I couldn’t be stopped. Not now.
Instead I said, “I love you both. I don’t say that enough. But I need you to know that everything I’ve done, everything I am. It’s because you always believed in me.”
My mother reached across the table and took my hand. “Joon-hi-ah. What’s wrong?” Her voice had gone careful. “You sound like you’re saying goodbye.”
She’d always been able to do that. Cut through whatever I was performing and find what was underneath it.
“I’m not. I just—” The lie arrived smoothly, years of practice making it easy. “I’m grateful. That’s all. I don’t say it enough.”
She studied me for a moment, not quite satisfied. Then she squeezed my hand and let it go.
My father was watching me with that other look. The one that said he knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth and had decided to let me keep it for now, because he trusted I had my reasons. He’d been giving me that look since I was seventeen. He’d been right to trust me, most of the time.
I hoped he was right this time too.
“Is there something you’re not telling us?” he asked. “I saw the limousine waiting outside, the driver leaning on the car and looking all around, instead of smoking like he always did before. And the bodyguards you mentioned. You never had them before.”
“Just being careful. After Cannes, Starhouse wants to make sure we’re protected.”
“But you’re safe? You’re okay?”
“I’m okay, Appa. I promise.”
He looked at me for one more moment. Then he nodded, and reached for more fruit, and changed the subject to the new elevator the owners’ board had finally approved. “Your father is on the council now,” my mother said proudly. “Maybe president next year.”
I let the mundane conversation wash over me and tried to breathe. Sang-hoon’s foot pressed against mine under the table. Just resting there. Not a signal, not a message. Just I’m here.
Two hours later, standing in the doorway as we were leaving, my mother held on a little longer than usual.
“We’ll be there Tuesday,” she said. “Front row, cheering the loudest.”
“I’ll look for you,” I said. “I’ll look for you right away.”
I meant it as a promise. I said it like one.
She kissed my cheek, and then she held my face in both hands the way she’d done since I was a child. That gesture had always meant let me see you, let me actually see you. She looked at me for a long moment without speaking.
“You’re happy,” she said finally. Not a question.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
She let go. “Good. That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”
In the elevator on the way down, Sang-hoon and I stood side by side without speaking. The grinding sound on the way up had been a familiar irritant. Going down it was something I wanted to memorize.
The driver was waiting. We got in.
I lasted about three blocks before the tears arrived—quietly, the way I’d learned to cry during years when I couldn’t let anyone see.
Sang-hoon didn’t say anything. He just shifted so I could lean against him, and put his arm around me, and let me cry in the dark of the backseat while Seoul moved past the windows.
“She called you happy,” he said after a while.
“She’s right.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “She’s completely right.”
We rode in silence the rest of the way. At some point his hand found mine and stayed there.
My parents would be at World Cup Stadium on Tuesday, front row, proud of everything their son had become. They didn’t know there was a woman in Seoul planning to make sure Tuesday was the last time they’d ever see him perform.
They’d believed in me since I was seven years old. They’d mortgaged years of their lives on the chance that I was worth it.
I was not going to let Tuesday be the end of the story.